Poems by ​S J Fowler

​The Ghost and the Darkness
 
We will not complain.
We will not change our protagonists.
We will have to admit, it is a serious problem.
There is not a healthy one thing to look up into.
There is not any cache in being,
but there is some in being consumed.
The animals come to relieve us,
and to kill for pleasure in parody.
In a normal lions it is feeding that is working,
but all this, under trees,
I waited watching.
I caused litigation among former neighbours.
Cats are inevitably unknown, fantastic.
The whole territory is eighteen ninety eight.
They should make up. But they won’t.
Along lines of communication to Tsavo,
from posts, boring the train,
with visions of a wife and child murdered,
by creature, under cold sheets, I listen. I love it here.
Hoping yet not hoping the rifle is adequate, untested
and in the late morning, startled to the sound of roaring,
I said ‘you’re going to regret doing that’,
and began to smell the smell of Bernard's blood.
In a sink. On the white sheets. In the thickets of thorns.
 
RELEASE: 12 June 1997
DIRECTOR: Stephen Hopkins

November
 
The ladder of bread
leads to the roof
of slappy pigs.

↑  
The sauna is full
of human sized chickens
birch thrashing

↓  

The dead are buried
treasure,
if you wait (long enough)
to dig them up.
 
                            →                              
 
Quite the surprise
to witness flagellation
as a permanent historical
host hog.

←
 
Wait for the woods in the dead
and you'll find
love lornly

​
 
RELEASE: 3 February 2017
DIRECTOR: Rainer Sarnet

​
NOTE: Both poems are part of the forthcoming collection Come and See the Songs of Strange Days (Broken Sleep Books, 2021).

​SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and artist who lives in London. His work celebrates the potentials of poetry to excavate new understandings of specific subjects, mindful of language itself, as well as conceiving of the poet as performer, artist, collaborator and organiser, as much as writer.
 
He has been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, Tate Britain, the London Sinfonietta, Wellcome Collection and Liverpool Biennal. He was nominated for the White Review prize for fiction in 2014 and has won awards from Arts Council England, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Creative Scotland and Arts Council Ireland.

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